I miss when LEGO sets were playable
Nowadays everything is just made as a shelf piece
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Yeah, the extra details are nice, but that doesn’t mean Lego had to stop making gappy-yet-massive playsets. If anything, they could probably do them even better than before now; a lot of those sets were pretty flimsy.
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Yep, I agree with you both ( Including @TheJerminator )
I like how many new and useful parts we’ve been getting lately, but most sets aren’t more than extravagant paperweights.
(At least, if you’re not interested in highly detailed display sets/model kits.)
Opinion: Aside from the TV show, Dreamzzz is not a bad theme. The one thing I’d change other than the tone and story of the series is maybe the line’s name.
I think “Dreamerz” would’ve been a better title, but who knows.
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Interesting.
I’ve engaged in a similar discussion on that very topic quite frequently as of late. However, with such an atmosphere can MOCs and alternate builds flourish. Perhaps, the aging audience of LEGO contributes to the change in theme from “constructible toy” to “collectible” in this current age.
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I get why it’s happening, but I don’t like it. Just because Lego can appeal to an older audience doesn’t mean they have to neglect the younger audience.
Ultimately, though, I have to wonder if this is actually maybe two separate things, and the growth of the “adult” sets and the reduction of “kid” sets are actually unrelated.
In other words: is Lego intentionally diverting resources from “kid sets” to “adult sets”, or does the adult market just happen to be growing at the same time that the kid market is shrinking?
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People are mad over brown sets being discontinued and replaced with gray, keetorange, and yellow sets.
I say: Brown sucks. All my homies hate brown. Honestly think it was a good move to retire its use.
It worked okay with Pohatu and his G2 version, while it was either mid or lame on others.
Brown sets didn’t sell well for a reason. It’s just not a popular color in general.
EDITED FOR GRAMMAR CORRECTNESS - Spiderus Prime
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The real answer is lack of a new market.
All those new suddenly-interested adult collectors? Most of those are people who either had LEGO sets growing up or were drawn to a specific niche adult-targeted set LEGO produced in recent years, one-offs like Stranger Things and the Rolling Stones logo. But for the most part, it’s the former.
LEGO used to have to compete only with a fairly sturdy action figure market and the rise of child-oriented television shows, namely animated cartoons. Now LEGO has to compete with the entirety of social media, the smart phone industry, each and every social media platform… Well, you get the idea. Kids nowadays not only have a greater sense of apathy for LEGO than before, they also have a wide plethora of much flashier alternatives, including a significantly more robust video game market than in prior years (despite the lightning-in-a-bottle aspect of some of the video game sector’s sales and attention, the public opinion towards video games as a whole has grown significantly more favorable in the last decade).
While it’s sad that LEGO has shifted its focus towards the money and away from the target audience, it’s not entirely surprising even ignoring everything I just said. Although the general appeal and overall quality of the builds and designs in sets has grown, the value of those same sets has seen a sharp decline, as sets opt for smaller and smaller pieces to jack up the price and ultimately make people pay more for far less in return. I don’t mean to ‘back in my day’ with this, but LEGO sets seemed to find the perfect equilibrium between size and play value between 2005 and 2015. Everyone I’ve spoken to who owned sets from that era has a level of nostalgia that’s hard to find anywhere else in the community.
And with themes like Atlantis, Castle, Hero Factory, Space Police, Bionicle, Power Miners, LEGO Board Games, Exo-Force, The Minifigure Blind Bags, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, Pharaoh’s Quest, Indiana Jones, and the rise of themes like DC Comics and Marvel, it’s not hard to see why.
Plus my favorite LEGO vehicle released in this era so I’m incurably biased 
LEGO’s shift in target audience is less a move towards more money and more a move towards less morals. They publicly decry pieces of media that feature explicit violence and themes unsafe for children, yet they include such themes in their catalog as Jaws, Stranger Things, Dungeons & Dragons, and increasingly prevalent references to portions of DC and Marvel media not suitable for all ages.
This wasn’t a corporate moral compass born out of weakness or an attempt to hoodwink the general public. Ole Kirk Christiansen suffered through the Nazi occupation of Denmark and became the head of the local underground resistance, organizing significant efforts to combat the German invasion across Denmark all while being forced to provide lodgings to them in his own home. He kept his company alive throughout the course of the war and afterwards gambled most of it on the plastic brick that would come to dominate the world. These values LEGO claims to uphold were made in the spirit of Ole’s original vision, but it’s hard to see the eccentric and evidently quite brave Danish carpenter and tech fanatic in the sets they produce today.
So TL;DR, for all the folks who skipped the obnoxiously long post and went straight to the end (hi, by the way), yes they are. But it’s not driven by good business sense more than it is by moral slippage, the slow decline of LEGO’s standards which defy what the company was founded upon. What reasoning there is behind this one can only speculate, as without honest answers from each of the board members and the executive team running the show, we will never know for certain.
I’ll see if this turns out to be an unpopular opinion about LEGO 
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What you describe as moral slippage, matches my feeling towards every big franchise I grew up loving. Maybe it’s inevitable with time, and people should learn to let things die.
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It’s a little hard to convince the entirety of the world to stop purchasing LEGO sets as a means of “letting go” when for most consumers, it’s about the currently available product, and not brand devotion. But I agree with you in terms of the smaller themes under the LEGO umbrella, both current and former, and that some things are done a disservice by pretending they hold relevancy in the greater global zeitgeist and perpetuating their continuation to relive the glory days.
These ideas were new and inventive at their inception. We need to strive for those sort of ideas again instead of clinging to the legacy of our own personalized nostalgia. And by that I mean Fabuland guys c’mon we’re never getting it back you need to let go
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I agree. I more meant that generally people tend to prolong forms of art or concepts to the point of stagnation.
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Funny that I got that as a freebie back when Toys ‘R Us was doing free LEGO events…
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Witnessing all of these wonderful Bionicle MOCs & Revamps sparks a bit of wandering thought as to what a reality it would be if LEGO released multiple large “technic” bins that individuals of all ages could utilize for their own creations in a similar vein as the large colorful LEGO Classic Creative bin set.
I would, of course, label it as “technic”, though is the dissatisfaction of Bionicle parts not being considered “real LEGO” still relevant?
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2006-2007 Lego Castle was peak and we will never have it ever again. I miss old Lego Castle before it was 400 dollar collectors sets. 
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I suppose that one transforming Castle from the LEGO Movie was quite neat.
I wonder, what is the general consensus of the LEGO Movie sets anyways?
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Despite not really having sets from any of these themes besides Bionicle, I do agree that they had a certain “cool factor”, particularly the in-house themes. The playability of stuff like Power Miners was another thing that a lot of modern sets seem to lack, though I’ll admit I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of the newest themes.
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I liked the ones that had a consistent feel (the robo-police vehicles, the crane mech, etc.), but some, like the castle and ice cream truck aircraft sets felt rather like they were made solely to get certain themes to have sets rather than for anything else. It’s mainly the Castle one I dislike, since it just doesn’t have many parts that fit the aircraft design, while the others at least started as a modern vehicle and thus had machine parts that could be used in alt-builds. Its base model of a castle is good, though.
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Continuing from this point: apps.
A lot of the playability of new sets is locked behind an app. I get that virtually every kid today is going to have a phone, but it’s still inconvenient.
Though at least it’s not as bad as all the various form of motors and electronics. If you don’t want an app, at least you can still play with your Hidden Side sets like a normal Lego set; all the post-Power Functions motors are literally unusable without their respective apps (a lot of which are also unusable even just outside of the context of a specific set).
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I don’t have any of these sets, but I think the fire truck mech looks sweet.
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In my opinion, in Bionicle: Mask of Light, Hahli should have remained as the fourth companion in Takua and Jala’s quest to find the Toa of Light.
If I remember correctly, she meant to go with Jala and Takua on their mission to find the seventh Toa.
However, the creators dropped that idea and left her out of their journey.
This was a mistake, as it could have been a great way to deepen their relationship and even develop their personalities more.
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